A Game Based On John Carpenter’s Halloween Poses A Tricky Question In The Horror Genre

John Carpenter, noted gamer and part-time horror legend, is returning to Halloween, the iconic slasher he directed (and, perhaps more famously, scored) in 1978, which birthed a landmark horror franchise. This time, however, he’s doing it with a controller in his hands. As revealed today, the director is teaming with Boss Team, the developers of 2022’s Evil Dead game, to bring Halloween to life in the form of not one, but two horror games.

Though we don’t know much about either game yet, the studio teased players will be able to “relive moments from the film and play as classic characters from one of the most iconic and important horror films of all time.” The team also revealed that one of the games is being built in Unreal Engine 5, and that it’s in early development.

Presumably, this is the bigger of the two projects and it sounds like it’s years away. We ought to also assume this is an asymmetrical horror multiplayer game, as rights holders are eager to bring their IP to games right now and this genre has become the popular method of doing so. With probably years before the game arrives, the team has time to figure out how to solve what seems to be its most burning question:

In a world in which we’ve already seen the Friday The 13th game, how does a Halloween game stick out?

I love asymmetrical horror games, so I tend to play them all and play them a lot. Just in my time here with GameSpot, I’ve already reviewed three recent entries to the emerging genre, including Evil Dead, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and Killer Klowns From Outer Space, and if you go looking for it, you can find my Friday The 13th review elsewhere, too. Each of these has its special ingredients and standout flavors of PvP horror.

For Evil Dead, the player controlling the Kandarian Demon can inhabit multiple entities in any round, each with unique abilities to counter the survivors’ goals. In Texas Chain Saw Massacre, the game leans into the original movie’s family of killers rather than making it The Leatherface Show like future sequels did, thus creating a unique 4v3 setup. Killer Klowns lets players fight back more than any other game like it. They all have their differentiators. Does a Halloween game have one?

I get very excited every time a new one of these games crops up. I’m glad these license holders are seeing the room to grow that games provide and they’re handing their IP to skilled studios to turn classic horror movies into engaging horror games. Because of my enthusiasm, I’ve thought a lot about yet-to-be-seen horror franchises becoming games and tried to picture what those would look like.

A Nightmare on Elm Street, for example, has an obvious hook in the form of the dream world in which Freddy Krueger does his best work. Putting players in an ever-shifting nightmare where they can be both victims but also perhaps Dream Warriors straight out of the movies makes translating that series to games seamless. Scream, my favorite horror series ever, similarly benefits from a unique angle seen throughout its franchise: the whodunnit aspect. With this element tied into a PvP horror game, I’ve long imagined something that results in a hidden-role Among Us-style horror experience. Even a Child’s Play game could toy with the size differences of the killer versus his victims spread across intricate multiplayer maps.

But Halloween… Halloween is tricky.

That’s because, as awesome as Michael Myers is, the series seems (to me anyway) to lack a differentiator that allows it to stand out from Friday The 13th in gameplay terms. In both, the killer is a tall, supernaturally durable masked maniac wielding a large sharp object and hunting down teens. What is it that allows Michael Myers to stand out from Jason Voorhees in video game terms?

Sure, the setting will be different, moving from a summer camp to a suburb, and for superfans of either series, you likely want to see your favorite come to life, even if it’s quite like the other. But as a game, haven’t we seen this one before? It’s funny; Halloween predates Friday the 13th by two years in the movie world, but now, decades later, Michael is trying to play catch-up to Jason.

However, don’t take my questions as criticisms necessarily. There are several reasons to still be excited. For one, right now the only way to play a Halloween game–of a sort–is to play Dead By Daylight. Though DBD gives each of its killers, including Michael Myers, unique skill packages, the format of any round is still the same; players work to activate clunky generators and escape from a map before they’re fed to The Entity, the game’s central villain. This defies Halloween’s series logic–even if Halloween 6 went way off the rails into some similarly cultish territory of its own.

Bespoke horror games, like Texas Chain Saw Massacre, give players a world designed specifically for a certain franchise, and the difference is obvious. That’s something that DBD can’t compete with, despite being the biggest game in the genre. Plus, as a big horror fan, I admit I’d quite like to see each of the slasher icons get their own game one day.

More importantly, however, the Friday The 13th game shut down amid licensing issues beyond the game creators’ control. Though peer-to-peer matchmaking is still possible for now, such an arrangement is subpar as a player experience and it’s unclear how long that will be allowed to continue. So maybe it’s okay if a Halloween game looks a lot like a Friday The 13th game since we’re living in a world that has already effectively lost such an incredible memory maker as Friday The 13th.

Lastly, there’s Carpenter himself. Other recent asym horror games have included the blessing and some level of involvement of their franchise’s original creators, but to my knowledge, those creators have not been big gamers themselves. They’ve been given progress reports, or they’ve provided insight into the original creations from which developers can then transpose those experiences into an interactive experience. They’ve entrusted their properties to skilled teams like Gun Media and Illfonic, and that’s a smart way to do business, but Carpenter is a capital-G Gamer. I like to think that provides the game with a unique touch in which the film’s creator also valuably understands video games at a design level.

He talks a lot about the games that have grabbed him, such as Fallout 76, and when asked about his legacy as a master of horror, Carpenter once famously and relatably told Insider, “I just want to play video games.” For these Halloween video games now in the works, Carpenter is said to be “intimately involved,” and perhaps, ultimately, that’s the special hook for a Halloween game. Whereas other recent multiplayer horror games based on popular movies have had their original creators on the sidelines giving a thumbs up, Halloween’s games will come to fruition from the legendary film’s original director/avid gamer himself. How’s that for a differentiator?